Update for the 2012 season

This post continues a series starting at http://sandbelt-sandpit.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-to-download-afl-videos.html. The series was mostly composed in 2011 when there was no guarantee of what might happen in the next year. Now it is a third of the way into the 2012 season and it is clear that the engineers at Telstra are happy to continue with their previous practices, at least as far as locating the game videos is concerned, and this is a good thing.

To recap:

All games from 2010 onwards are stored on the Telstra servers as simple mp4 files that are easy to download once anybody has a link to them. The AFL website used to make this simple to do, but in recent years all the file links have been hidden behind a wall of javascript (the BigPond AFL videos website is just as bad). 


The 7 September 2011 post went into some detail about how you can discover the file links and ended up with a pattern that could predict the url for any quarter of any game in 2011. I am now fairly confident about how to make predictions for the current year.

The Pattern:

The links for 2012 look like this, so far:
Q1 
http://bptvpd.ngcdn.telstra.com/pd_afl0/OnDemand/2012/ON/iVideo/Premiership/RDnn/AFL12_rdnn_hhh_vs_aaa_1st_qr_full_2M.mp4
Q2 
http://bptvpd.ngcdn.telstra.com/pd_afl0/OnDemand/2012/ON/iVideo/Premiership/RDnn/AFL12_rdnn_hhh_vs_aaa_2nd_qr_full_2M.mp4
Q3  
http://bptvpd.ngcdn.telstra.com/pd_afl0/OnDemand/2012/ON/iVideo/Premiership/RDnn/AFL12_rdnn_hhh_vs_aaa_3rd_qr_full_2M.mp4
Q4  
http://bptvpd.ngcdn.telstra.com/pd_afl0/OnDemand/2012/ON/iVideo/Premiership/RDnn/AFL12_rdnn_hhh_vs_aaa_4th_qr_full_2M.mp4


To make real links, replace nn (in both places) with the round number, hhh with the home team name and aaa with the away team name. Round numbers are like 01, 02, 03 and so on. Team names are adel, bl, carl, coll, ess, fre, geel, gcfc, gws, haw, melb, nmfc, port, rich, stk, syd, wce or wb.

One minor glitch:
Gold Coast has to be written gdfc in (and only in) rounds 02 and 03. I assume that this is somebody's carelessness.

For Bombers Fans:
Sandbelt has used this pattern to predict where the Essendon videos will be for the whole of all the current home-and-away season. Left-click a table cell to view, right-click (or, I hear, Apple+click) to download. 

R01 nmfc v ess Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 R02 ess v port Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 R03 gcfc v ess Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 R04 carl v ess Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 R05 coll v ess Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 R06 ess v bl Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 R07 ess v wce Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 R08 ess v rich Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 R09 gws v ess Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 R10 ess v melb Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 R11 ess v syd Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 R12 ess: bye

R13 fre v ess Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 R14 ess v wb Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 R15 stk v ess Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 R16 port v ess Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 R17 geel v ess Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 R18 ess v haw Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 R19 adel v ess Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 R20 ess v nmfc Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 R21 ess v carl Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 R22 rich v ess Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 R23 ess v coll Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4

Downloads do not count towards your quota if you are a BigPond customer.
Videos typically appear a few hours after the game ends.